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When I'm not running PulseAudio, just ALSA, music works fine. If PulseAudio is running, muting Master or Speaker also mutes the other, but then to unmute, I have to unmute both of them individually. My goal is to make PulseAudio not mute Speaker when I mute Master.

The behavior I'm seeing is also mentioned here, but I don't see anything about how to disable it (besides not using PulseAudio, but I have some things that need it).

OS: Artix Linux 5.8.8
Pulseaudio: 13.0-3

Yujiri
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  • Not sure what exactly you mean. In Pulseaudio, Pulseaudios sources, sinks and streams have their own mute and volume behaviour. If you are running Pulseaudio, you should use those (and not the ALSA mixer ones). Pulseaudio maps the sink/source volumes and mutes to ALSA mixers in a way that can be influenced in the Pulseaudio configuration files, but it's not fun to do this. So the better fix is to give more details on why are you using ALSA mixers when running Pulseaudio, and find a way of stopping to do that. – dirkt Sep 18 '20 at 04:48
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    I'm under the impression that Pulseaudio is just a layer between ALSA and applications to make certain things easier. My mute hotkeys run ALSA commands so they work without Pulseaudio. – Yujiri Sep 18 '20 at 16:04
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    Pulseaudio does use ALSA for final output, but it's a sound system transport on it's own. Why not change your mute hotkeys to run `pacmd` instead of `amixer`? – dirkt Sep 18 '20 at 17:25
  • Because I want them to work without Pulseaudio. I know this is possible because it worked on the same operating system with all the same things installed before my last reinstall. I don't know what I've done differently. – Yujiri Sep 19 '20 at 18:27

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Partial answer:

With the additional information "should work both with Pulseaudio, and just with ALSA", I guess you'll have no other choice than to configure which ALSA mixers Pulseaudio changes.

I had a look at that years ago, but I've forgotten all the details. Here's what I remember:

Pulseaudio keeps track of "profiles", which in turn map to a particular ALSA usage, and the files for the mixers are in /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths. To avoid messing up the default configuration, you need your own profile, and then you need to associate it with the mixers you want.

For writing your own profile, I think I mostly used information from this answer.

I can't remember if I actually needed to setup mixer paths, so there may be a few bumps on the road until that works.

Have fun, this is going to be quite a bit of work.

dirkt
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  • Thanks. After seeing the complexity I was looking at, I decided to just let it depend on Pulseaudio and bind my mute key to `pactl set-sink-mute 0 toggle`. – Yujiri Sep 21 '20 at 00:10
  • That's what I would have suggested, too. – dirkt Sep 21 '20 at 03:09